The Freudian Robot

Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious

E-book $10.00 to $32.00About E-booksISBN: 9780226486840
Published
May 2011

The identity and role of writing has evolved in the age of digital media. But how did writing itself make digital media possible in the first place? Lydia H. Liu offers here the first rigorous study of the political history of digital writing and its fateful entanglement with the Freudian unconscious.

Liu’s innovative analysis brings the work of theorists and writers back into conversation with one another to document significant meetings of minds and disciplines. She shows how the earlier avant-garde literary experiments with alphabetical writing and the word-association games of psychoanalysis contributed to the mathematical making of digital media. Such intellectual convergence, she argues, completed the transformation of alphabetical writing into the postphonetic, ideographic system of digital media, which not only altered the threshold of sense and nonsense in communication processes but also compelled a new understanding of human-machine interplay at the level of the unconscious.

Ranging across information theory, cybernetics, modernism, literary theory, neurotic machines, and psychoanalysis, The Freudian Robot rewrites the history of digital media and the literary theory of the twentieth century.

1 Where Is the Writing of Digital Media?Why Civilization MattersPostmodernity and New MediaThree Conceptual LacunaeFundamental Challenge to Literary TheoryThe Techne of the Unconscious

2 The Invention of Printed EnglishHow the English Alphabet Gained a New LetterWhat Is Printed English?The Genetic Code and GrammatologyThe Ideographic Turn of the Phonetic AlphabetThe Number Game in the Empires of the Mind

4 The Cybernetic UnconsciousFrench Theory or American Theory? Lacan Reading Poe: “The Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’”Les Jeux: Game and Play on the Symbolic ChainThe Cybernetic UnconsciousReturn to Sender

5 The Freudian RobotThe Uncanny in the AutomatonThe Psychic Life of MediaWhat Is the Medium of das Unheimliche?The Uncanny ValleyThe Neurotic MachineMinsky and the Cognitive Unconscious

6 The Future of the UnconsciousThe Missed Rendezvous between Critical Theory and CyberneticsThe Ideology MachineOur Game with the Little “Letters”

Works CitedIndex

Review Quotes

Mark C. Taylor, Columbia University

“Lydia H. Liu is a rare scholar whose work combines rigorous analysis with imaginative interpretation, reaching across an unusually broad range of fields and disciplines. The Freudian Robot is a stunning book that completely reframes psychoanalysis by revealing its previously undetected debt to cybernetics and information theory. In an age of overspecialization and glib popularization, Liu’s study is a model of the kind of work we need.”

“This rich and thought-provoking book eschews the traditional dichotomy ‘human’ versus ‘mechanical,’ proposing instead the notion of the ‘Freudian Robot’ as a way of understanding contemporary civilization. . . . This book paves the way for a new focus on the osmotic interaction between human beings and machines, providing a challenging contribution for an audience widely read in literary theory, media studies, psychoanalysis, and semiotics.”

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